The most expensive places to buy in Ireland

The most expensive property sold in 2017?

€8.4 million was paid for a house in Fintragh of Shrewsbury Road according to the Daft.ie. Five streets have had transactions of €3 million or more in the last 18 months: Shrewsbury Road, Ailesbury Road, Temple Gardens, off of Palmerston Road in Dublin and Westminster Road in Foxrock.

Only one percent of all homes in Ireland are worth €1 million and over according to the Property Price Register.

Highest number of over a million home transactions is Herbert Park in Ballsbridge.

Total spent on housing since 2016?

€800 million was spend on housing alone since 2016 according to the Property Price Register. That averages around €12 million every week paid for in housing. The average price for a house the first quarter of 2017 was €230,000.

Ten years ago, however, the average home was worth around €370,000. After the crash, the average price of a home was around €165,000 five years ago.

Total of all Ireland’s Property worth?

If you would combine all the valuations of all the properties in Ireland it will …

Read More →

Valuations in property are currently meaningless

Free markets, or indeed markets in general, have a tendency to set prices, not through control, not by one person holding up a placard and shouting from the rooftops, but rather through the process of prices reaching a point at where they occur, where demand and supply are reacting with each other.

So if you look for €3 million for a three bed semi in Donnycarney your property will not sell, no matter how much you want it to. At the same time, if you were to list a property there for €50,000 it would sell overnight, and both of these extremes demonstrate a pricing being totally out of balance with the market. The interesting point now though is this: The market itself doesn’t know what is happening, so valuations are currently meaningless. By that I mean the people who go out and value property are not able to make accurate assumptions about property prices in this market, we are seeing this daily, and then dealing with the end result which is …

Read More →

Fixing symptoms is not a solution

This is an interesting conversation that appeared on Bloomberg with Jim Bianco. He makes the interesting point that there are really two roads out of the place we are in, depression or reflation. Internationally Governments are doing all they can to support the economy, the issue however, is that when these plans don’t work it will be pegged as being a ‘failure of capitalism’ when in fact, it only reinforces the fact that capitalism is working as it should by getting past a bubble and letting the prudent players win out in the end. The ‘Why’ is really ‘why are we trying to stop the market from working’ not ‘Why did this happen’ or ‘why me’.

Fixing symptoms is not the same as finding a cure.

Read More →

If you are not going to buy make sure you get cheaper rent.

In the current property market sales are down, it is having a big effect on many financial institutions because the decrease in transactions is causing net lending to shrink. This is well established and brokers as well as banks are in the news talking about the ‘changing’ (sometimes we prefer the plain English term ‘crashing’) market.

So if you have decided that you don’t want to buy, or you do and you can’t find a motivated seller (we’ll be doing a post later on how to find motivated sellers) then you have likely come to the conclusion that you will rent for a while. The nice thing about renting is that you can live in the area of your choice with little cost in changing locations (compared to buying in an area). If there are problems with the property then they are the landlords problems and all in all it’s a fairly handy existence.

The downside of renting is that you don’t and will never own the place (assuming the landlord doesn’t offer to sell you the gaffe). And you …

Read More →